


Paint

by carpelucem



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 06:48:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carpelucem/pseuds/carpelucem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peeta’s fingers would have itched for color and design, no matter where he ended up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paint

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through The Hunger Games.

Peeta bakes because he’s good at it. It’s a skill acquired by environment, something he would have never learned if not for the family he’d been born into. It’s practiced, his talent for breads and cakes. His hands grow strong after years of kneading dough and shaping loaves, his eyes sharp when accurately gauging weights and measurements.

His artistic ability, though, is something that Peeta knows would have followed him anywhere. In the Seam, in the merchant quarters, in the Capitol, Peeta’s fingers would have itched for color and design, no matter where he ended up.

He paints to keep the nightmares at bay. Near the south facing window, in the unfurnished living room of his giant new house, Peeta sets his supplies, pigments and paper, an easel his victor winnings bought him. The pictures are usually dark, slashes of grey and green that look a jumble up close, angry splatters of red marking them all, that only make sense when he views them from across the room. 

That seems appropriate, though. He’s distancing himself from the Games, and Peeta would imagine someone better qualified in matters of stress management, someone’s who has never ventured out of their climate controlled bubble into the reality of an arena where children murder one another or beg in winter for scraps of food, they would tell him that it’s healthy for him to use his art as an outlet for his feelings.

And he is, but Peeta also does it so he can sleep a few hours a night, so he can get up every day and keep his family and his fellow victors in bread, so he’s not a barely-functional alcoholic like Haymitch.

Katniss slips through the electric fence early in the morning, sometimes before he leaves for the bakery, when fog still hugs the damp ground. She roams under the trees, tracks game, traipses through the woods to hunt, always returning with a brace of something over her shoulder. Unlike him, she keeps killing.

Peeta thinks that maybe the repetitive motion soothes her, like the muscle memory of his fingers on a brush soothes him, just for a moment, so that maybe she can remember how to breathe again.


End file.
